


Writing History

by Rhiannon87



Category: Uncharted
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-09-30
Updated: 2012-11-02
Packaged: 2017-11-15 09:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/525789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhiannon87/pseuds/Rhiannon87
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Where they come from makes them who they are. Headcanon, character introspection, and trying to work out how they ended up where they did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Elena: Unwritten History

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She had a life before Nathan Drake. Elena Fisher, in moments and over years. (Revised Jan. 7, 2014 for headcanon issues.)

She’s born and raised just outside Tallahassee, the only child of a carpenter and a part-time librarian who'd both been well into their thirties when she came along. Books are the only thing she has in common with her mother; her father gets everything else, the tree houses and soccer games and movie marathons. It's not perfect, of course, no one's life is, but she misses it sometimes, when it's over and she's grown up.

*

She’s ten years old when she learns that life’s not fair.

Not coincidentally, she’s also ten years old when she learns to throw a punch.

Elena’s both small and smart for her age, shorter than the other kids and happier to keep her nose in a book than play hopscotch at recess. That’s not to say she doesn’t like to play outside; her parents can barely keep her indoors most days, but when she’s at home, she’s alone. No one pushes her or trips her or steals her glasses. It’s better that way.

She’s leaving school for the bus when the older kids, the bigger kids, catch up to her, and it doesn’t make sense for them to take her books and throw them in the mud. For them to push her to the ground, to take her glasses and smash them on the pavement. She never did anything to them. She doesn’t deserve this, and she knows it.

She tells her parents about it when she gets home—she has to, she can’t hide the scrapes or the tears—and while her mother purses her lips and goes to call the principal, her dad takes her to the backyard and shows her how to fight back. “Keep your elbows up,” he says. “Little bit like you, they’ll never see the right hook coming.”

Her mother doesn’t approve, but she doesn’t make them stop, either. The next time one of the kids at school grabs Elena, she bloodies his nose with a right hook. Her dad picks her up from detention and takes her out for ice cream, both of them giggling and promising never to tell Mom.

*

When Elena’s fourteen, her mother buys a camcorder for the family. At least, it’s supposed to be for the family; as soon as Elena figures out how to work it, she's running around the yard and the neighborhood, making little movies to show her parents and friends. 

She doesn’t know who she wants to be-- she swings between archeologist, reporter, professional soccer player, film director, historian. Her dad tells her she's got plenty of time before she has to decide. Her mother sighs and brings home books on whatever her fascination of the month is and gives up on convincing her to wear skirts.

When she's sixteen, her father teaches her to shoot. Her mother teaches her to drive. She still wants to do everything and be everyone, and none of that leaves a lot of time for friends or dating. She doesn't mind. She's not sticking around after graduation, anyway.

*

She's eighteen when she moves to Colorado. Her mother's proud and her dad's heartbroken that his baby girl is moving across the country. She misses them, sure, but college is so much of everything she wanted that she doesn't have time to think about it too much. She goes through four majors in a year before settling on communications and art history. She makes friends, joins clubs, goes through two break-ups-- one friendly, one ugly. Again, it's not perfect, but she's happy. She's got a place she belongs and the whole world, the whole future, just waiting for her.

She's three months shy of her twenty-first birthday when her parents die.

It comes out of nowhere, a phone call as she's getting dressed to go to dinner with her friends. It’s the first single girls’ night of the school year, the first one she’s joined in on since breaking up with her boyfriend. It's supposed to be a fun Friday night. Instead she sits on the edge of her bed, listening but not comprehending, as a doctor says things like “car accident,” “would've been instant,” “I'm so sorry,” “is there anyone you can call?”

She packs a bag, buys the plane ticket home, remembers to withdraw from her classes and apply for a leave of absence. She can handle everything just fine, paperwork and business, until she gets to the airport and realizes there's no one to pick her up and take her home.

She has to write the address down for the cab driver, because he can't understand her through the sobbing.

Her parents' friends help her with the funeral arrangements and the finances. It's a shock, seeing her parents' accounts-- they were deep, deep in debt, her father's jobs few and far between. But they never told her. They kept paying her cell phone bill and sending her monthly care packages and buying her plane tickets home. They couldn't afford any of it but they never said a word.

And that wrecks her again, on top of the fact that they're _dead_ , dead and gone and she's a twenty-year-old orphan, left to deal with lawyers and debt collectors who just keep calling and calling and calling. She has to pack up the house, twenty-five years' worth of living and loving and family; she can't bring herself to sell any of it, so she uses her savings to rent a storage unit and dumps most of it there. She does sell the house-- she has to, in order to start paying the bills.

She's twenty-one when she goes back to college in January. And she's fine, she says, she's just fine, and she buries herself in her work so she can forget about what she's lost. She manages to get a scholarship and goes on a study abroad trip in Tibet, because she thinks that nothing there will remind her of her parents. So of course everything does-- the kids in the streets and the students calling home and her reflection in the mirror looking so much like her mom that it hurts. She buries it all and buries herself in her studies.

When she gets back, she starts seeing a therapist. It helps, as much as it can.

*

Elena's twenty-two when she graduates-- communications and art history, summa cum laude, and god, they'd have been so proud-- and she's facing a mountain of debt even before her student loans come in. It takes her about two weeks to realize that her degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on as far as getting a job goes. One of her friends half-jokingly suggests she try out for a new reality show they're filming down in Mexico. She figures hell, it can't hurt.

No one's more surprised than her when she gets a spot. She figures out pretty quick what her role's supposed to be-- spunky girl-next-door-- and she plays it with skill. No one expects her to handle the challenges, physical and interpersonal, as well as she does. 

By the fifth episode, she's got an agent and a near-guarantee that if she makes it into the final three, she'll get a contract of her own. She places second, and the money's enough to pay off most of her parents' debt.

The first episode of her archeology show airs three months later. Her producer takes her out for drinks when she turns twenty-three.

*

She's twenty-four when her producer sends her an e-mail with a proposal. She reads over it, raising her eyebrows at a few of this so-called “historian's” claims, but hell, it sounds like it could be fun.

_Sir Francis Drake, huh? Sure. Sounds cool. Just make sure this guy's not a serial killer, all right?_

Two months later, she boards a boat in Panama and flips on her camera. “I’m here with historian Nathan Drake…” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is, obviously, my headcanon for Elena's personal history, since we really don't get anything about her life outside of Nate in the games. The most defining piece of it is, obviously, the fact that her parents are dead; that's a headcanon that I've had from pretty early on, and it's informed how I've written her in pretty much all my fic. Elena, like Nate, seems to have a certain amount of rootlessness. I can't point to any one specific instance that makes me think that, but it's the overall impression I get. But she doesn't seem to have the bitterness that would come with being estranged from her family, so I settled on her having had a good relationship with her parents until they died suddenly. Being an only child with no other living relatives basically puts her out there alone. It makes her relationship with Nate more interesting, too, in my opinion, as it means that they're both trying to find something like home in each other, instead of Elena automatically being that stability for Nate.


	2. Nathan: Something More

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You learn more than a few things about yourself, when you put this much effort into inventing an identity.

You know most people don’t put this much effort into their identity. But most people have something to work with, something they can build on. They don’t have rotten foundations and poisoned bloodlines, memories not just of being left behind but of being willfully rejected. You grow up knowing one thing for certain: you’re not wanted.

And you can’t live like that, not unless you want to end up like your mother, so you find something different. You find a hero, learn him inside and out, take on his name, start living the lie. It’s not an impossible story. Sir Francis Drake could have had children with a woman in the Americas. You could be his descendant. There’s no proof otherwise.

It’s not your real name, but it’s one you chose, and that’s better, anyway. You steal the ring and tell yourself you’re taking it back, reclaiming what’s rightfully yours, what should have belonged to his family. Your family. Later, you’ll say you sort of inherited it, shrug and smile, and it’s not totally false. You introduce yourself with his name and your voice doesn’t catch, even if the name doesn’t fit right.

It will, eventually. Or you’ll make yourself fit it. Become someone worthy of the name.

Sully takes you in, lets you hang around, and you can never figure out why. You tell yourself to stop wondering about it, to just accept that for whatever reason, he likes you enough to let you stay. You become a treasure hunter, a tomb robber, a thief, and you’re good at it. You like it, most of the time, although you could really do with fewer gunfights and explosions some days. You travel the world, meet interesting people, charm more than a few women into bed. You’ve got a reputation to go with the name, and it’s a good one. This is who you are. Not a reject, not an orphan, not a filthy little beggar unfit to touch these objects—you’d be lying if you said you didn’t gloat, just a little, just in your head, every time you take a priceless artifact in your hands. Every successful heist, every celebratory drink, every new ally is just another way to prove that you’re so much better than where you came from.

Then Elena strolls into your life, with an easy smile and a brilliant mind and a love of adventure that rivals your own. Looking back, you know you were pretty much done for when she tore down a wall to spring you from prison, but it didn’t seem to get complicated that fast. You don’t even notice that you’re falling in love with her until it’s almost too late, until she’s bleeding out in your arms and you realize that you don’t want to live in a world without her in it.

That’s when it gets complicated.

You’ve never done this before, being in love like this, sharing not just the adventures but the boring everyday with someone else. You do your best to keep Elena out of your work, because the thought of letting her follow you back into danger is terrifying, and for a while… for a while, it's okay. It’s good, even, good enough that you decide to take the metaphorical leap and marry her. She’s happy, and much to your surprise you’re happy, and that should be enough.

It should be. But it’s not. You're turning down the kind of jobs you'd have jumped at, years ago, playing it safe. And you realize that your carefully constructed identity isn’t working anymore. It doesn’t fit, or you don’t fit it, and that’s not right. You’ve spent twenty years wearing that identity, and you don’t know what you are without it.

Well. That’s not true. You do know. And who you are without it isn’t something you ever want to be. Not again.

So you throw yourself into it twice as hard, tell Sully you want to go after Drake’s secret treasure again, bury yourself in research. Elena’s hurt and confused, and you try to tell her that this is your life, this is who you are. (This is who she fell in love with, who she married, and no one's going to give a damn about you if you're not Nathan _Drake_.) You can’t just give it up. Not for anyone, not even her.

She asks—she begs—you to stop. So you leave. You pack up your research and you go back to Sully, the one person who’s never questioned you, never tried to make you change. He’s disappointed, but he lets you stay. The two of you work together, fill in the plan, bring in old friends. And if you have to change the channel every time the news goes to a report from the Middle East or if it takes you twice as long to fall asleep in an empty bed, well, you’re adjusting. You’ve got the heist and the promise of adventure, and that’s all you need because that’s who you are.

You almost believe it, right up until you cross an airstrip in Yemen and see Elena for the first time in months. The two of you start fighting within minutes and it’s so damned wrong, all of it. You used to be happy to be with her, and now you can’t even talk. It’s your fault and you know it and you have no idea how to fix it. If it can be fixed.

Then everything goes wrong in the worst possible ways. Marlowe neatly strips away all those stories you’ve told yourself, all the lies you almost believed, then discards you like the unnecessary castoff you are. And it’s only the threat of Sully being hurt over your stupidity that drives you on, that sends you tearing through a small army to save him. Then you almost die, several times, and when you finally wash up on the beach your only thought is getting somewhere safe.

So of course you go to Elena. You’ve fucked up beyond the telling of it, you’re bruised and battered and broken in every possible way, so you go back to her. And she takes you in, because she still loves you, and you tell her you’re sorry, because you still love her. It’s why you leave her behind at the airfield, because you love her, because you still can’t bear the idea of a world that doesn’t have her in it.

It’s not until later, when you’re standing on the airstrip again, staring at your wedding ring, that you realize you’ve been trying to prove yourself to all the wrong people. It was a pithy one-liner back in Iram, the only acceptable response to Marlowe’s demand that you prove yourself, but you think now you were right. You’ve got nothing to prove, not to her. Maybe not even to yourself.

You’re an unwanted orphan, you’re a thief and a treasure hunter, and no amount of lies will ever change that. But you’re starting to think that you can be something else. Something better. A good husband, a good son—and that one’s going to take some getting used to—maybe, finally, a good man. You know who you are. But maybe now, you can be more than that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This entire story was written in about 30 minutes in a burst of cross-fandom pollination, in which my brain took a line from Castle's Kate Beckett ("It's made me who I am. But I want to be more than who I am.") and applied it to Nate. This chunk of character introspection is the result.


	3. Chloe: Unhappy In Its Own Way

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. And some of those unhappy families produce thieves.

People with happy childhoods don't go into this line of work.

Chloe's been in the business for decades, and she's yet to meet anyone who speaks of their families with affection and nostalgia. It's hard to find people who talk about their pasts at all, really. It's just sort of... not done, talking about it, or even worse, asking. She learns things about her friends, of course, things that slip out in bits and pieces. Nate ran away when he was a kid and hitchhiked through Central America. Harry's father was a drunk who beat him and his brothers. Charlie's mother worked herself into an early grave, trying to provide for her children. Hell, Elena's not even in the business, not really, and Chloe thinks that something terrible happened to her parents. She's not sure, though, because none of them talk about it.

And Chloe doesn't even give up those sort of little hints. They've all got their reputations, and mystery is a big part of hers. She tries to hide where she's from, what her family was like, anything about her life from before the day she moved to London and started driving for one of the gangs there. It's not out of grief or regret, though. Mostly, she just doesn't want people to know that she's got a family. Everyone else has tragedy and death in their histories. But not her.

Her parents are still alive and married. Her little sister's married too, and she's got two nephews. No one died when she was too young, no one beat her, she never ran away. But remember: no happy childhoods, not in this career, and Chloe's not the exception.

She's the oldest child of two doctors. She guesses that they had children more because it was expected, rather than out of any actual desire for them. Her parents love their jobs, then each other, then their daughters, when they remember. When they have time. They never had much time, over the years, and Chloe was mostly raised by babysitters and television shows. She spent her after-school hours in hospital waiting rooms and break rooms; for other people, the smell of hospitals is unnerving, a reminder of illness and pain and loss, but it just makes Chloe think of math homework. 

But just because her parents were never there didn't mean that they didn't have certain requirements. They were important people, even back then, and they had to maintain appearances. Chloe and Amelia had to have excellent grades, join the right clubs, be perfectly behaved. They were accessories or trophies, something to show off at parties before being put back in their rooms so they wouldn't disturb the guests.

Chloe learned quickly enough that she'd never be good enough for them. She would never make them happy, so why bother trying? She had to look out for herself and her own happiness. So she cut class when it suited her, drove fast cars and drank good alcohol and slept with the cute boys in her class because she liked it. She was the rebel, the wild child, the disappointment, and she'd just smirk whenever her mother started lecturing her. It wasn't like she really cared.

Her sister ran the other way. Amelia’s a pharmacist, married to a doctor of her own, raising her two boys a mere ten-minute drive away from the house she grew up in. She’s trying to be the daughter their parents want, and it’s never enough. Chloe could have told her that, if she’d asked. If they’d talked, much, after Chloe moved away. But they didn’t, so now she just reads between the lines in the infrequent e-mails Amelia sends and is silently thankful that she had the good sense to skip town at nineteen.

She hasn’t been back to Melbourne in six years, not since her youngest nephew was born. The boys know they’ve got an Aunt Chloe only because she sends her sister envelopes stuffed with cash and a note telling her to buy them something nice for Christmas, for their birthdays. She exchanges a handful of e-mails a year with her sister, talks to her parents even less than that. Her family thinks that she’s still driving limos in London for a living. She’s never cared enough to correct them, or even to make up a better story.

But she never talks about it, never tells any of her friends and partners the truth. It’s so boring, really, the things that damaged her, that left her the way she is, guarded and self-centered and cynical. So she leaves it a mystery. Let her past be shrouded in fog and questions. It’s better that way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And my headcanon for Chloe's family (with bonus Harry and Charlie headcanon cameos). I wanted to get into how she wound up in her particular line of work, but it didn't really fit with the rest of the story. Maybe it'll show up somewhere else someday.


End file.
